An Evolving Field

By JOHN WILLIAMS

January 17, 2014

Twenty years ago, Jonathan Weiner published “The Beak of the Finch,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about two biologists studying rapid changes in the birds on the Galápagos Islands, where Darwin observed the same creatures in the 1830s. In the Book Review, Douglas H. Chadwick called it an “admirable and much-needed treatise” that explains “very complex scientific and philosophical concepts in lucid prose.”

This week, Weiner reviews “The Monkey’s Voyage,” a new book about evolution by Alan de Queiroz. I asked him about his memories of researching and writing “The Beak of the Finch.” “The most vivid moment was my visit with Peter and Rosemary Grant on the island of Daphne Major,” he responded via email. “I got there early in the morning in a little fishing boat called the Flamingo, which I later learned had sunk the year before. The Grants were busy with some finches at the rim of the volcano. Watching them at work, everything I’d been reading about evolution suddenly made perfect sense.”

Asked if he was surprised by any developments in the field since 1994, Weiner said: “The Grants saw signs that global warming was driving evolution, even in the Galápagos. Since then, there have been field reports like that around the world. I’ve been amazed by the speed of the upheaval.”

Quotable

“No one thinks it’s real. I mean, a lot of people think it’s real in the sense that everybody has a grandmother that talks about soap opera characters as if they’re real. . . . Part of it is the joy of interacting with fiction as if it’s reality.” — David Shoemaker, author of “The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling,” in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books

A New Dimension

Move over, “Gravity.” The cover of this week’s Book Review is our first to feature a 3-D illustration, created by Mirko Ilic.

Ilic, the art director of The Times’s Op-Ed pages from 1992 to 1993, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review. He told me via email that his work to accompany Thomas E. Ricks’s assessment of Robert M. Gates’s memoir, “Duty,” was inspired by the fact that Gates served “under Bush (red) and under Obama (blue),” and that in dealing with Congress and the White House, the secretary of defense had to “consider both colors at all times.”

Ilic knew many readers would be missing a vital piece of the puzzle. “I needed to make a compromise for the illustration so that it would look O.K. without the glasses,” he said. “I also needed to make sure readers would not think it was misprinted, which is why the lenses of the binoculars were perfectly in-line while everything else starts to fall apart, which incidentally also works well as a concept.”